Circle Jerks

I rode the bicycle yesterday from work to my in-laws, who live on a South Sacramento corner that was recently converted from a four-way stop to a traffic circle:



This thing does absolutely nothing to slow down traffic. The four stop signs as you approach it are often ignored. Particularly, alpha male jackoffs in light trucks are the worst offenders, but really, almost everyone navigates this thing dangerously.

Standing on my in-law's lawn for ten minutes was all it took. That corner is brutalized by speeders. There were very nearly two accidents, both of which were caused by two single brown guys in their Chevy trucks, both failing to stop before entering the circle. My question is, why is my country filled with these dumbshits?

It's probably because we heavily subsidize our roadways...more than any other thing we subsidize. It's a "free good," and people will always take advantage of these. If gasoline were correctly priced at $8 a gallon to reflect the true cost of our roadways instead of funding it from general taxation, people wouldn't find it acceptable to dangerously accelerate around a traffic circle, even Hispanic male South Sacramentans. It would be too expensive to buy power, and too expensive to waste gas accelerating. If their daughters had to ride their bikes to school because it's too costly to shuttle them everywhere, perhaps these assholes would become civilized people; perhaps they'd be unwilling to tolerate others from doing the same thing they are currently doing.

In all four directions away from this traffic circle, each of these streets carry their own "traffic calming" speed bumps.

But these are totally useless. We allow spaces to accommodate the wheelbase of fire trucks and buses and cars simply weave through them, and in most cases around Elk Grove and Sacramento, the spaces are sufficiently narrow enough to allow a car to miss the bumps completely, allowing every 60 mph speed racer to drive right down the middle of the street. This is another case of why, in my opinion, "fire safety" is a load of horseshit relative to the degradation of "life safety" because we refuse to build traffic calming devices that are truly effective in slowing down traffic. Let's continue the stupid policy of letting firemen respond quickly to traffic accidents, accidents enabled by the fire departments themselves. Talk about job security!

Yet truthfully, no amount of calming will work so long as my nation remains filled with circle jerks. We have to fix them first. We deserve our 41,000 traffic deaths and 2,490,000 injuries per year; we deserve them because of our public policies of purposely enabling people to turn into dumbshit drivers, willing to navigate residential traffic circles like their NASCAR heroes.

I say we deserve these, and I'm absolutely resolute in that statement. Until we address our culture of speed and stupidity, and there's no indication we will ever willingly do that, we get what we deserve.